Posted
by
msmash
on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @12:40PM
from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Wind and solar are about to become unstoppable, natural gas and oil production are approaching their peak, and electric cars and batteries for the grid are waiting to take over. This is the world Donald Trump inherited as U.S. president. And yet his energy plan is to cut regulations to resuscitate the one sector that's never coming back: coal. Clean energy installations broke new records worldwide in 2016, and wind and solar are seeing twice as much funding as fossil fuels, according to new data released Tuesday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). That's largely because prices continue to fall. Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity in the world. But with Trump's deregulations plans, what "we're going to see is the age of plenty -- on steroids," BNEF founder Michael Liebreich said. "That's good news economically, except there's one fly in the ointment, and that's climate."

The problem is Slashdot, Reddit, and the rest of the world are all full of assholes; and people like to claim reasoned, weighted analysis of facts are "opinions" rather than something like "conclusions". That lets people claim their so-called opinion is as valid as yours and, specifically, not capable of being wrong.

Take a minimum wage argument. Minimum wage has some complexities if you have a firm enough grasp of economics and money in economics.

Minimum wage increases because the amount of money increases faster than the amount of people, which requires more spending on the same products, which can only happen if prices increase. That means a fixed minimum wage starts to fall as a wage; with a given positive rate of inflation, that means these people's buying power and standard-of-living falls. To avoid minimum-wage workers becoming poorer and poorer, you have to raise the minimum wage along the way.

At the same time, wages are paid from revenue. That means spending. Spending comes out of income, which means it's a periodic cycle. Higher wages for everybody (proportionally) means inflation; higher wages for a subset means fewer things bought, which means fewer jobs. As minimum wage falls in purchasing power with inflation, additional jobs are created in this lowest-class; and when we true it up, those additional jobs are lost.

So a minimum wage increase 1) is necessary to meet the specific goals of minimum wage; and 2) has consequence of reducing the number of jobs, largely due to artificial increase in jobs available by lowering wages and thus allowing price lowering. Those are real, verifiable impacts largely agreed upon by economists across decades of publications, with a few dissenters who published papers with murky conclusions, weak assertions, and flawed methodology. That's a similar pattern to anti-vaxxer and climate-change debates, to which we tend to default toward consensus.

This draws all kinds of asinine responses everywhere. Most of it is people arguing economics from their own ideals instead of reasoned thought or a survey of consensus. To be fair, people argue a lot from often-repeated but factually-inaccurate ideals not supported by science, like that minimum wage increases are paid for almost 100% by the rich, or that a $1 increase in a minimum-wage income becomes $6 of spending and jogs the economy 6 times as hard. Most of the things we talk about are things we haven't personally been able to verify.

One of the enormous red flags, though, is the reasoning of "opinion". Someone, recognizing they've lost the reasoned argument because the facts stacked in front of them are too obviously-correct to attack, will claim that their "opinion" that raising minimum wage increases the number of jobs available (via minimum-wage spenders being able to spend more--never mind that they're only getting money that now isn't spent elsewhere, and will have to spend a larger chunk of that money on things produced by minimum-wage workers) is just as valid as your "opinion" that raising minimum wage decreases the number of jobs available.

Opinions are great. We can discuss opinions all day. Where will technology take us? Is Uber or Lyft better? Is Bullet for my Valentine as good as Iron Maiden? Is Final Fantasy 7 or Ocarina of Time more overhyped? Opinions are not facts, and conjectures occur in the absence of sufficient underlying reasoning and historical trends--and even conjectures have some factual basis, largely suggesting the form of what's missing. At a point, we're discussing what some of us understand better than others--and much of the world is filled with children who have less knowledge than the people who they're arguing with, and insist they must be right even though the other guy once thought the same thing, and was wrong then.

Welcome to a world full of assholes who care less about facts than about furthering their social position by either being right or being allied to a group of peers with the same imaginative fantasy about how the world works.

Part of the problem is in the vocabulary we use. To lose implies this is a competition, that an individual can be the victor of a reasoned discussion. The value is in the dialog, the exchange of knowledge, and the changes in individuals that occur. The value is not in being the one happened to start off on the winning side.

People are always competing for social status. They want everyone to recognize that they're better than you. Being wrong is a bad way to go about that, hence why debate is about influencing the audience and not persuading the other guy.

Honestly, think about it for a second. Suddenly the deterministic, factual, correct conclusion is "an opinion" so both mutually-exclusive assertions are equally-valid and thus that person can claim to be not-wrong. That doesn't even make sense in technical discussions.

Opinions are fine, but facts are better. An informed opinion is supported by facts or logic and therefor has some value.Opinions without anything to support it can also be valuable in that it can open a dialog, but people have to be willing to change their opinions when presented with overwhelming evidence.

Opinions are fine, but facts are better. An informed opinion is supported by facts or logic and therefor has some value.
Opinions without anything to support it can also be valuable in that it can open a dialog, but people have to be willing to change their opinions when presented with overwhelming evidence.

Many have no intention of changing their mind though - that's the problem.

For a change of pace, how about we talk about the fact that everything the article had to say about the deregulation was quoted in the summary? I actually read through the article to get more details, but none were to be found.

The rest of the article provides some (quite interesting and informative!) graphs and analysis about the current and future state of energy both globally and in the US. Nowhere in the article did they talk about what form the deregulation would take, when it would start, when Trump approved it, or any of the other salient details you'd expect in an article that was ostensibly about coal deregulation.

I have no reason to doubt that Trump is doing exactly as Bloomberg said, but I'd love to see some information about it, rather than the bait-and-switch they pulled with their lede that has nothing at all to do with the rest of the article. Alternatively, Bloomberg could have just shown me the graphs, since they're good in their own right and shouldn't be buried under a lede that has nothing to do with them.

Which is to say, as you see the comments filling up with people arguing about deregulating coal, enjoy a nice laugh at the fact that they're taking sides based on an article that has nothing to do with the topic they're arguing about.

Here it is then. A straight up conspiracy to temporarily resuscitate coal mining so the crap investment can be dumped on pension funds and gullible mug punters. It seems the rich and greedy held on too tightly to those coal investments, hence the need for a major conspiratorial pump and dump. The reason why coal will crash, simply to environmentally damaging from carbon to coal ash, it simply is an ancient energy source that should have been abandoned years ago and they know it, hence the need for a major p

We are no where near the limit on natural gas. And natural gas is one byproduct of oil extraction. But the rest of your comment is on point.

If we actually had to look at the total cost of coal to our country, we'd see that it would be cheaper to setup a pension for all the miners and pay to retrain the younger ones and early retirement for the older ones. It's lived long enough on our subsidies. Pay the people, not the industry and shut it all down.

1. Jobs for the people building and maintaining the pipeline.
2. Tax revenues on their incomes and the incomes of the companies building the pipelines.
3. Moral for people who are ignored by coastal elites and are told that "they need to be re-educated." Not to mention the inflow of consumer dollars to hard hit communities.
4. Stop sending money to religious fanatics who then send money to radicalize mosques (you, as an educated person, should be quite aware of this).
5. Stop sen

Good for all Americans?
1. Jobs for the people building and maintaining the pipeline.

Most of this will be temporary.

2. Tax revenues on their incomes and the incomes of the companies building the pipelines.

See #1

3. Moral for people who are ignored by coastal elites and are told that "they need to be re-educated." Not to mention the inflow of consumer dollars to hard hit communities.

Valid topic, keep reading.

4. Stop sending money to religious fanatics who then send money to radicalize mosques (you, as an educated person, should be quite aware of this).

This, while sounding true, is more blind than short-sighted. Think of the people that stopped investing in horses and shifted to automobiles.

5. Stop sending money (and jobs) to other the middle east and Russia.

Ok, you probably need more information to understand #4. Go read about how Germany made a law guaranteeing a good price for consumers that produced solar energy, back in the 90's. Out of nothing, it created an industry. Companies were born to build and install the panels. The country instantly became a global powerhouse for a growing industry (despite the same amount of sunlight as Seattle), and it led to a stock market boom. The real estate sector grew too - owners with roofs all of a sudden gained unexpected value in their investment. After so decades of profitability, the effects of a policy going too well are starting to set in and they do face issues, like China subsidies have been killing them, and they now have so much power they have to sell it to their neighbors. So they're tweaking a few things with the laws, maybe no more subsidies are needed anyway. But overall, it's been a huge success, and there's even been less power outages (granted, some work went into achieving that). So, moral of the story is that there are UUUGE profits in being the leader of a technology for the world, as long as you're willing to work.

6. Reduce the need to "protect" dangerous areas - hence less military presence, less potential for engagement.

The bad guys would rather blow up a huge oil refinery than a few houses with solar panels, or a couple wind turbines.

7. Money will flow to Canada and Canadian companies (as opposed to Saudi). This is a general plus dovetailed with points 4 and 5.

The re-education is a red herring here. You're pushing politics into an issue that is not really political. The basic facts are that some jobs have gone away permanently, and retraining is a good way to get a different job. Anyone who says they already know how to mine coal and refuse to learn a different set of skills for a new job are their own enemies, the people on the coasts are not causing the problems. The reasons the jobs are going away is because the coal companies are automating the jobs, they don't need as many workers per unit of coal. All the political wrangling in the world won't change this, you cannot force companies to hire workers that they don't need.

The "coastal elites" comment again shows that youre trying to make this political, and implies you believe in the silly idea that there's literally a cultural war going on. If you live on the coasts you will see that they are not full of elites, there are a few of course, and there are elites in Kansas and Wisconsin too. California is a state full of liberals and conservatives both, you will find any and all political views represented. When you make this a fight about "us" versus "them", then you are a part of the problem in creating divides. I know this is easy to do, we're sort of hardwired to always have an enemy to direct anger towards.

Even if we had bad relations with Canada they are not actively spreading religious bigotry such as Saudi Arabia.

Putting up trade barriers is not the best thing. Creating 3000 page "free-trade" deals is not necessarily the best thing either. (And I had great hope that NAFTA would be a plus - plus for all involved.)

The Saudi government spreading their disgusting version of Islam is a major fu(king problem.

Sarcasm aside, that is exactly why coal jobs are not coming back. Coal production is in fact very close to an all-time high in the United States-- we're mining about 900 million tons a year, more coal now than we did in 1990 (or any year before then).

But we're doing it with machinery now, not with coal miners. Even if coal production increases, the jobs ain't coming back.

The commenters here aren't to be blamed. Blame msmash and the other Slashdot editors for putting these shitty submissions on the front page multiple times every day.... So when a quarter of each day's front page submissions are about "climate change" in some way, then of course climate change is what we'll be stuck discussing.

I counted the headlines before this one, and out of the 50 posts in the last two days, exactly one ("China To Boost Non-Fossil Fuel Use To 20 Percent By 2030 (reuters.com)") was related to climate. Another one, ("The EPA Won't Be Shutting Down Its Open Data Website After All (mashable.com)") could be considered slightly somewhat peripherally related.

So, that's--at most--two out of fifty: four percent. Your claim "a quarter of each day's front page submissions are about "climate change"" is bullshit.

Coal is only cheap when you ignore the environmental damage it does. Even disregarding the CO2 issue. Once you factor in all the measures you need to take to protect the environment from the radioactive waste, the sulphur and other nice byproducts of burning coal, well, it's not that cheap anymore.

Coal is dead. Helping coal MINERS makes sense, but trying to resurrect something that is dying because of market forces (and good riddance) is the most retarded incarnation of "conservatism" since trickle down economics.

We have given them medical coverage for their black lung disease through the ACA (in the past coal industry provided doctors had to make the diagnosis, and surprisingly nobody had black lung disease, now they are being recognized and treated) and they voted for a candidate who promised to kill the ACA

We have offered them job retraining and a future in solar energy and they voted for a candidate who promised to keep sending them underground to die by promising further deregulation to coal mine owners who regularly turn off methane detectors

Give 'em what they want, and when they get tired of being abused, send them back down because they have already rejected our offers

If I seem cold, it is because all of my ancestors were coal miners and WE figured this out decades ago.

The problem is that even if coal is completely deregulated, it's not miners who are going to be doing the extraction. The future of mining is automated. At best this will just give the coal barons a few more years of profit and do dick for the miners.

But it's not even going to be that good. Natural gas is killing coal, so there isn't even going to be a coal industry by the time renewables dominate. This is a classic "buggy whip" problem, in that there ain't gonna be no more horse-drawn carriages, so there ain't gonna be no more buggy whips. Whatever you think of Clinton, she was telling the miners the truth, their jobs are quickly becoming obsolete.

And the same goes for lots of other industries. Manufacturing is rapidly automating, so that even mass repatriation of US industrial capacity is not going to deliver the same level of employment that was there even thirty years ago. There's nothing the US government can do about it, short of outlawing automation and renewables, which would be sheer madness.

Christ, no less than Rick Perry himself has admitted the US needs to stay in the Paris Accord. Even the most pro-oil of pro-oil politicians know full well the jig is up. Oil isn't coming back, and as the price falls away it's impact on the economy diminishes. Coal was the first because it's the most expensive and most obviously harmful, but it applies to all the fossil fuels.

Unfortunately it's expensive to help the population of a whole region when one the biggest economic drivers of that region collapses.

It does not take a lot of education to mine coal, nearly all education is hands-on on-the-job and is physical. A region whose primary employment is like this can let its education system slide while still keeping a degree of productivity, but if that industry leaves then what remains is generations of people without the education to readily persue other forms of work. One ha

Perhaps the people in those regions should not have voted for politicians who hollowed out the education system, blocked infrastructure development and generally acted in ways that benefited nobody except coal mine owners.

It's been obvious for a generation that coal was coming to the end of its life. Perhaps they should have looked forward instead of attempting to emulate King Canute.

I don't disagree with you. Unfortunately poor education begets poor decisions which begets poor education, the circle of derp if you will.

Come in as an outsider to attempt to help and you're disrespected for being that outsider, even if you have reasonable intentions. Be an insider that managed to get that education despite the difficulties and you're branded as an elitist, even if your goal is to attempt to bring everyone up to your level.

The best argument against local control (ie, Federalism) is seeing what people do with it. The best argument against having only a central-controlled government is currently residing at 1600 W. Pennsylvania Avenue, when he deigns to stoop so low as to stay there.

The currently popular form of conservatism in the US is not about making sense, or even adhering to any sort of coherent system of values. Abortion and all forms of birth control = evil. Taxes = bad. Government = bad. Civil rights = bad. Brown people = bad. Immigrants = bad. Absolutely no room for nuance.

It wasn't always like this, but most moderate conservatives have been flushed out of office. I'm in Ohio, where the governor is an actual moderate conservative. He's one of the last.

Coal power in the US is dead, but that has much, much less to do with any 'green revolution' and significantly more to do with the large oil companies entering the shale game after OPEC decided to try and destroy the US shale market through supply shenanigans. With their entry and the rapid R&D into efficiency caused by the price drop in oil, they've figured out how to frack for 20-30 dollars per barrel. That being said, coal is still very much alive in China and elsewhere, which means that properly run, coal mining will be around for decades. The issue is that it is unlikely to support nearly as many people.

large oil companies entering the shale game after OPEC decided to try and destroy the US shale market through supply shenanigans.

I remember that meme. The news orgs pushed it pretty hard. But digging in, it just looked like nationalism talking. That or the oil companies were directly writing the script. What "shenanigans" did OPEC play?

Because as far as I can tell, the only shenanigans was that they didn't reduce their own production. The US increases production, and is pissed off that OPEC doesn't slit their own throat and reduce theirs. That's REALLY not shenanigans. That's actually what's SUPPOSED to happen. Two big giants having a price war and refusing to try and artificially boost market prices through restricting supply. YAY free market.

And... Do you see the paradox in your statement? US enters shale market after OPEC tries to destroy US shale market? One of those things happened first.

You probably missed it because you were only looking for examples of OPEC reducing production. Shale oil used to cost around $80-$100/bbl to extract. As long as the price of oil remained below that price, extracting shale oil was economically unfeasible and oil companies threw just a token amount of money into its R&D just to keep it ready on the back burner. So OPEC was trying to keep the price of oil high, but below that $100/bbl threshold. When the price of oil did drift over $100/bbl, OPEC increased production to try to bring the price back below that threshold, keeping shale oil borderline unfeasible.

I think what OPEC (and everyone else) missed was that you don't just get oil from shale oil. You get natural gas too. And that natural gas is what's turned out to be a bonanza, leading it to surpass coal, and threatening to pass oil as the leading fossil fuel. It's driven further shale oil extraction R&D (I believe its cost is well under $50/bbl now). So at this point OPEC is along for the ride just like everyone else.

OPEC oil production really did rise in 2010. [gaffney-cline-focus.com] Right around the time that US shale oil production came online. Buuuuuut maybe you missed it, but there was this little thing that happened around the 2008 time-frame known as the econopocalpyse. OPEC dropped it's production because no one was buying and the price of a barrel fell from $150 to $40. Prices went back up and they increased production back to where it was before the crisis. OPEC is indeed just along for the ride. Blaming them is like blaming t

Not necessarily. There are applications for coal other than burning it. The biggest one that comes to mind is activated coal - which can be used to clean up toxins, guide chemical reactions and act as the material between super capacitor plates - all of which are good for the environment. It just depends how it is used. With the demand for batteries in the clean energy sector you could quite easily mass produce super capacitors to fill the gap and have a more robust power grid as a result, without the n

Sure. Even if Trump rolls back some regs, no one is going to build a new coal plant with a 50-60 year lifetime. The regs will come roaring back in 2020 or 2024, along with new carbon taxes. The worst that will happen is that a few old dirty coal plants may delay retirement.

Helping coal MINERS makes sense

That depends on the type of "help". Handouts that encourage people to put off hard choices often do more harm than good. Development funds for Appalachia have traditionally been a bottomless pit of waste. There are good reasons that nothing other than resource extraction has been successful there. Transportation is difficult on mountain roads, and the people are poorly educated, close-minded, and unambitious.

By far the best way to help these people is to assist them in MOVING SOMEWHERE ELSE.

Disclaimer: I was born and raised in Eastern Tennessee. I have many relatives there, and all of them are doing poorly. I also have many friends and relatives that, like me, moved away, and they are doing much better.

This isn't about trying to resuscitate the coal industry (though if it lets it run a little longer and die more smoothly - rather than being suddenly assassinated in a fit of political vitrual-signaling - it will let the miners and their offspring migrate to other jobs, rather than to government assistance.)

It's about killing off the massive, expensive, and intrusive regulatory infrastructure that no longer s

Coal has always been heavily subsidised by not having to pay for its negative externalities. And I'm not sure your link is entirely unbiased, it reads like it's written by someone who wears a tin-foil hat or is paid by the fossil fuel industry.

You're missing the point of a carbon tax. The tax is meant to speed the end of fossil fuel use. And really it's natural gas that killed coal, so you're going after the wrong target.

The current market forces point to a direction of renewables, natural gas, and whatever nuclear remains operational (with no new nuclear plants). That's not a bad plan for the US for right now. However, natural gas in the US is currently 1/3 to 1/4 the cost of any other natural gas in the world. It is exceptionally, and historically cheap. Various people estimate that this low-pricing situation will last between 15 and 100 years. My personal opinion is that it is difficult to make estimates on that kind of timeframe.

Regardless, if natural gas in the US ever approaches the cost of natural gas elsewhere in the world, US consumers would be in for a very rude awakening on their utility bills. My personal opinion is that we should not eliminate these plants entirely. It isn't wrong to let market forces dictate our choices, but we should hedge against unfavorable market changes in the future.

As a strong supporter of renewable, as the economics of renewable continue to shift to make carbon unaffordable, then hell yes we should eventually tax renewables. Once renewables are at full scale and entrenched they should indeed pay their full cost to society just like an auto plant, internet company or a barber shop should. We are not quite there yet and each renewable technology is at different levels of economic and technological maturity so phasing in taxes and removing supports should be done in a

Indeed, renewables are drastically lighter on the planet than fossil fuels. I am a staunch environmentalist and I believe that renewable are such a wonderful and productive thing that they can provide more than just clean energy. Their economic power can help build our economy AND pay for many needs in our society. All human activity is going to have indirect (externalized) costs. National security, police roads, small pollination impacts, education for the workers who design and run the facility and ma

It has nothing to do with power. Electric arc furnaces work fine, but unless steel is recycled it has to be made anew from iron ore, and that requires carbon, either by the way of a blast furnace and coke (which is made from coal) or direct reduction, which requires either coal syngas or natural gas.

Is there a solution for bulk storage of large amounts of energy? Most renewable sources aren't "uniform", e.g. you need wind to make wind energy, sun to make solar energy, etc. The advantage of fossil fuels and nuclear energy is they don't have that same limitation.

For coal, this doesn't really matter - it still loses. To pick up where renewables leave off, you want natural gas (or even petroleum) turbines that can quickly be brought on and off line. Coal and nuclear are not really suited to this.

There are a few options, though none is really economical on a large scale. Compressed air storage, pumped storage, or just a really big building full of batteries. The better option might be real-time demand management. When the wind picks up, air conditioners across the country will turn on.

Well... I'm sure there are some promising technologies, but I'm looking for something that has been -demonstrated- at "city scale" or larger. Answering what "could be" is not the same as answering "here today." (Otherwise, I could make an argument for "clean coal of tomorrow";-) )

The problem with dams is that fresh water is an increasingly scarce resource. But there's several thousand years of history using dams and collection ponds to ensure uniform water flows for both consumption and power purposes

Pumped Hydro can provide massive storage. These are closed loop dams with an upper pool and a lower pool. To story energy you pump water from the lower pool to the upper pool and to recover energy you run water through a generator from the upper pool to the lower pool. There are pumped hydro facilities as large as 3 GW. As these are closed systems they do not have the same impact that putting a dam on a river has.

Another solution are distributed batteries at each substation. This has the dual advantage of helping with small transients on a branch and, when scaled out, adding substantial reserve capacity for the grid as a whole. The value to the grid in transient mitigation is cheaper than adding more transmission capability so the grid level storage is a free benefit.

Perhaps the best way of handling renewables is Demand Response. Many functions can be shifted as power becomes more plentiful, such as cooling can be moved from real time (daytime) to making ice at night when it is cooler (and more energy efficient anyway as the outside air is cooler) and then that ice can be used during the day to cool a building.

If a town has to import bottled water because a coal company is allowed to pump waste water into streams then you have set up some kind of subsidy, although indirect. How far should a country go to prop up a dying industry? What is the opportunity cost for being the last country to embrace the 21st century?

Trump knows there is no future in coal and it's not coming back. He's basically keeping a campaign promise. People in coal mining country were told by Hillary Clinton what they didn't want to hear, namely that there was no future in coal and, in a much quieter voice that apparently nobody heard, that they'd supposedly be retrained for new jobs. Trump simply told coal miners that their problems were somebody else's fault and he would remove restrictions on coal. In the short term it will probably save enough jobs for the over 50 crowd that they can retire from the mines, but there's no future for younger people in the field and Trump knows it. He's not going to say it out loud as the coal miners prefer to live in the delusion that they can turn back the clock here and they voted Republican and he wants their votes in the future, but I'm sure he knows it.

We've a similar thing here in Europe with the fishing industry. Fish stocks are dangerously low, and the EU has reacted by imposing strict quotas - though ones which ecologists keep saying are still not strict enough. This has incurred much anger from the fishing industry, because it's not just an occupation for them - it's a way of life, going back generations, and now they are being driven out of business by what they see as pointless regulations imposed upon them by distant politicians in Brussels.

They don't seem able to accept that there is a good reason for restricting fishing.

yeah but wouldn't it be cheaper both short and long term for those mines to hire the young folk? Its not like the union will last long when there are 10 jobs for every 100 men and the young folks will work cheaper (stupid yes, their best long term choice is to head for the hills but if people were planning ahead we wouldn't have so many people trained to mine something that wasn't going to be profitable over a generation or 2 from now).

Yeah, if only we had elected a president that wanted to help these people by re-training them into a modern set of jobs but instead we got one who will cut regulations so that his rich mine owning buddies can make more money while employing a tiny fraction of the people who are out of work.

There must have been some other option in the last election, someone who proposed re-training these folks and encouraging new businesses in these areas...

Your understanding of these things seems to be rooted in the 1970s. What you said used to be true, back then - but it's not today. The technology is improving rapidly, as is our ability to store and distribute that energy.

It's like the old notions about electric cars. All the prototype ones from 20 years ago were terrible on so many levels, in terms of power, range, recharge time, etc, not to mention cost. But as we're seeing now, that's changing radically. Go look at Tesla for instance. We may not yet be at the day where electric is 100% better in all areas, but it's now only a matter of when, not if.

Fossil fuels are easy to store but they are also dangerous as they can catch fire and/or explode pretty easily. (Yes I know current lithium batteries have a similar issue, but solid lithium batteries should solve this soon. Solid-state_lithium-ion_battery [wikipedia.org] ). I am guessing that sometime in the next decade stations and electric cars will be setup to swap a charged battery for your current battery. With these things humans could ween off of fossil fuels in the next couple of decades.

1) It produces more radioactivity than all other energy sources, including Nuclear power. (A small percentage of coal is thorium, which settles around wherever you burn the coal.)

2) It takes more work to mine it than all other sources (including uranium - though it does require less processing).

3) It takes more work to ship it from it's source to the plant than all other energy types.

4) It produces more carbon pollution than all other sources. Coal is basically pure carbon plus some nasty impurities. Oil and gas are Carbon + Hydrogen + some other stuff. Carbon burns to Carbon Dioxide (or worse, monoxide). Hydrogen burns nice and clean, turning into water.

5) Coal contains trace amounts of mercury, which when burned makes it's way into the atmosphere, then rains down into the oceans. Nasty stuff. No other energy source has this problem.

6) Coal mining has some nasty problems, including black lung disease and sometimes starts underground fires we literally can NOT put out.

No sane person mines coal for energy if they have any other energy source. All others are safer and better. Burning oil, gas, or wood are all better. Nuclear is better. Tidal, wind, solar, hydro, are all better.

Coal mining should only be used after you have burned all your forests up, mined all your uraninum, pumped all your natural gas and oil, and the sun has gone out.

Coal isn't coming back. It's something that sounded good to Trump's fans on the campaign trail, that's all. The coal industry employs fewer people than freaking Arby's. [washingtonpost.com] Fixing the coal industry would be like using a teaspoon to bail out a sinking Titanic. Middle America has far bigger problems that the dwindling coal industry.

Only reason why it's an issue at all is because it sounded good on the campaign trail for Trump's supporters. It's dog whistle politics [wikipedia.org], not an actual energy plan. To everyone else it sounds like Trump is saying "Coal is the future and will meet our energy needs cheaply and effectively!" Which it absolutely won't. But to his fans, it sounds like this: "Rust belt and former mining communities will get their jobs back and be prosperous again!" Sadly, it doesn't actually mean that either. Deregulate all you want, wind and solar are still going to be cheaper.

I feel bad for those folks in coal country counting on this guy to fix things for them. He isn't going to. He isn't able to. It'll be pretty bitter when they realize that.

Only reason why it's an issue at all is because it sounded good on the campaign trail for Trump's supporters.

More specifically, it appealed to people in one of the regional subcultures (Appalachia) who are often a swing vote. They mostly vote Republican these days, but they've never been closely tied to either of the two major parties, and Trump had to lock them down in order to shore up the fact that his support was weak in other traditionally-Republican subcultures (though he was helped by the fact that his opponent's support was weak in important traditionally-Democrat subcultures).

Well in the US, the electoral system lends itself to catering to demographic regions where the votes of the few outweigh the votes of the many when talking national elections. In "coal country" areas this will bolster the the voter base to continue support for Trump 2020 run. It's far easier to just reinstate what was taken in the form of coal jobs, rather than trying to find same income base jobs for those where coal mining is all they know.

Should 1.6% of the population of California have more say in the national government than 100% of the population of Wyoming? Should 2.4% of the population of Texas be able to negate the voice of 100% of Vermont?

"US" stands for "United States" Both the legislative branch of government and the national election system were created to provide a balance so that high population states could not impose their will on low population states via the U.S. government.

The governor is a billionaire coal barron, and he's doing his best to revive coal as well. One major problem is that natural gas has taken over and the coal market just isn't there now. Aside from that, the cost to mine coal is way higher than it is for natural gas. To mine coal, you have to hire hundreds of miners, buy or lease really expensive equipment, dig a hole a couple of miles into the ground, then transport the product via truck or rail car to the buyer. To get natural gas, you drill a hole in the ground, insert a pipe, and connect it to other pipes.

Then, you have to factor in foreign competition. I used to work in IT for a coal company at the beginning of my career (mid '90s), and in spite of doing $160 million in business per year, we went bankrupt. It was cheaper then to mine coal in China and ship it to our local power plants than it was to mine it locally. I'm not sure that the coal market it to that point yet, but I expect to return to those days. Coal truck drivers here were making over $70k per year while their foreign counterparts were doing that for a fraction of the money.

Ironically, my office is in what used to be the headquarters for Columbia Gas Transmission in Charleston, WV, but that was bought out last year by TransCanada and several people were laid off. However, I don't work in the gas industry.

There is so much more coal, natural gas and oil for us to mine. Just because it's there doesn't mean we should mine it. Technology has made us too good at surveying and finding coal and oil fields. If we wait until we run out before we stop, we have perhaps hundreds of years to go. And there are going to be dire consequences, if we try to continue mining and burning coal and oil in large amounts for that long.Now is the time to wrap up our use of some of these old energy sources and to invest in new energy sources. There are lots of proven options, and the technology around them keeps getting cheaper. It will be engineers and tech companies that are making the big bucks in the energy industry and not mine operators. (coal miners never made big bucks, I would say they got the shaft but that's an insensitive pun)

If you look at new power plants, nobody is building coal power plants. They're being dismantled far faster than new ones are being built. They're being replaced by natural gas and renewable power because it's cheaper. If you look at the last 10 years, coal has been declining quickly. Coal just can't compete economically, especially given that all of the cheap coal is now gone. The coal industry has been struggling hard to remain competitive (which is why so many coal jobs have been lost). Look at how many c

Coal is no longer economically advantageous [wikipedia.org] and the market is switching to sources that are. The cost per kWh for wind and solar have plummeted so much in the last couple of years they are now cheaper than nuclear which had for decades been the cheapest "clean" energy source. Many nuclear facilities are now being aged out and plans to build new facilities have dropped. Add to that energy storage technology has also come down in cost per kWh so those solar arrays can be used to generate power for overnight a

This article is fake news, Solar and wind are not cheap nor can they replace coal. They do not provide a base load. COal is cheap compared to solar and wind, is more abundant, does provide base load and can provide far more energy than solar or wind. Solar and wind cannot provide more than small fraction of coal. Scarcity produces higher prices, ergo, it is not cheap. It has low energy density as well, hence you can generate the same amount of energy with far smaller coal power plants, the equivalent solar and wind would involve massive infrastructure.

The only reason coal has declines is because of suppressive regulations. If the regulations are removed, then coal will become much more affordable and win in the market. Solar and wind cannot win in the market, because they are expensive.

that solar is environmentally friendly is also a myth. The massive amount of used solar panels is a huge environmental disaster in the making and the materials that they are made from are very rare, making photovoltaic nonsustainable. Due to low energy density of wind, there also exists massive material usage due to the large number of wind generators.

I'm sure, on a more local level (like Texas), Wind accounts for a more significant portion per-capita. As does solar in areas with lots of sunshine (like Nevada and Hawaii).

But considering that Nuclear, which is essentially stagnant or post-peak due to the way the market's been poisoned against it, is producing over three times the power that Wind and Solar do on an AGGREGATE basis.

And that Coal and Hydro (which is post-peak) EACH produce about five times what Wind and Solar (again aggregate) do.

I'd say calling Wind and Solar "unstoppable" at this point is putting the cart WELL before the horse...as in "What's that out there on the horizon?"

Do you have any actual evidence that wind farms have this effect? This strikes me as arguing that NASA shouldn't use gravity assist because it robs a planet of some of its momentum.

In other words, while you're technically correct, the effect is so small as to be irrelevant. But tell you what, if you have evidence that wind farms actually have this large an effect, then provide citations. And no, some blog is not a citation. I mean peer reviewed or primary literature.

With climate change, there's more energy in the atmosphere than before, so pulling a tiny amount out with wind turbines will help, not hurt. That said, the sort of wind power being installed now can't be taking more than a fraction of a rounding error of energy out of the atmosphere so it's only theoretical.

It's less than 40% now, but it won't be going anywhere because it's expensive to replace and solar/wind can't make that amount of generation. Natural gas combined cycle plants will be replacing coal eventually.

The article is way wrong. Gas and oil are not at peak production. That claim has been made every year since the 1960s. It's false. O&G production will be around for the next century.

That was once true, but no longer is [eia.gov] . "Coal-fired electricity generators accounted for 25% of operating electricity generating capacity in the United States and generated about 30% of U.S. electricity in 2016." - https://www.eia.gov/electricit... [eia.gov] . If you look at this graph [eia.gov] you can see that coal has been replaced by natural gas and non-hydro renewables. Since the renewables are only getting cheaper as the technology improves, there is no reason to suspect that their trend will not continue to accelerate upwards.

Coal has only been cheap because it has been allowed to pollute the air and water at no cost. If coal had to actually pay for the cost of the damage to health and the environment, it would be a lot more expensive (and scarce).

Great, then the market will kill off coal and we don't need propagandists or Government regulation forcing behavior. Obama and Hillary said flat out that they were putting Coal out of business by regulation and taxes, which we know as tyranny.

I have no problem with the best solution winning, but I certainly have a problem with Government agencies full of unaccountable appointees deciding who wins and loses.

Did anyone get a check back from Obama after the Solyndra bail-out fiasco? Nope. As with all of the

You correctly arrived at one response, that nothing you do now will change the inevitable failure of coal.

You incorrectly think that market failures for growing new energy are unusual. The major thing that kept renewables down for so long was access to capital. When most nations and corporations started investing capital in renewables, costs dropped. It's how capitalism works.

As to your own rates, that's probably because you haven't taken control of your own energy production, and built your own renewables,

You correctly arrived at one response, that nothing you do now will change the inevitable failure of coal.

My crystal ball does not work well enough to say that coal will die. Propagandists make the claim, I wait for what really happens. That is called reality.

You incorrectly think that market failures for growing new energy are unusual. The major thing that kept renewables down for so long was access to capital. When most nations and corporations started investing capital in renewables, costs dropped. It's how capitalism works.

I made no such claim, but your claim is a flat out lie. Subsidies have been poured into alternative energy, and this is still happening at massive scale. Take away the tax credits, incentives and subsidies and alternatives would not be able to compete with the exception of nuclear power. Wind requires massive amounts of land, and solar is still not co

However, like everything, if a technology comes along to supplant it, in this case, the cost of greener alternatives is lower than coal, it'll simply dwindle and fade over time, with absolutely no need for liberals trying to regulate the crap out of it.

This flawed argument ignores the incontrovertible fact that allowing coal to continue to provide energy on equal terms with other energy supplies rather than pressuring the market to switch to less environmentally damaging sources of energy would do real and

You are implying here, without actually saying it, that coal is over regulated but where is your evidence for that? The article has laid out a ton of reasons why coal is in decline that have nothing to do with regulation what so ever. Plus, it clearly indicates that automation has gutted the number of coal jobs that are created so adding more coal capacity (or using what we have) will not employ more people than increasing capacity of renewables so if its not really cheaper and its not creating more jobs,